Bitcoin Forum

This is a 42 minute long documentary by DW. It is worth watching and one of the most concrete videos I have ever seen about bitcoin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXAEdfIJN4

It's amazing how they lay the foundation by discussing cryptography, privacy and financial systems before bringing the Satoshi and Bitcoin into the picture. Another amazing and oblivious thing you will see is so many references directly taken from our beloved bitcointalk forum. That means no speculations, but based on the facts.

From the video I noticed at first they titled this documentary "The Satoshi  Mystery - The Story of Bitcoin", but later at some stage changed to "The Bitcoin revolution - How it all began". And I think this is more perfect, because I believe we are way past that stage of discussing "Satoshi Nakamoto" and focus on the big picture of Bitcoin and its cause if more important.

All major and important events and before and after bitcoin and after bitcoin are perfectly placed in sequence. Here's some prologues which I would love to highlight.

Cyberpunks and Cryptography
First and foremost important part of the internet is privacy and freedom which gave birth to cryptography. It all started with Cyberpunks "Freedom is non-negotiable, it tops everything, freedom is our struggle".

How Satoshi solved the decade old technical problem of double spending? In this video it is emphasized that Bitcoin is the result of decades of research and ideology of freedom and desire for secure payments.

Release of Bitcoin whitepaper:
Then comes the 2008 crisis when the financial world collapsed. On October 31st 2008 Satoshi released the whitepaper. Just over 8 pages very concise and to the point, the primary technical idea of Bitcoin was presented to the world. It looks like this work was already done and Satoshi was just waiting for the right moment to release the whitepaper and he did it in a style.

When the Bitcoin source code was released with genesis blocked mined with the headline from The Times UK on Jan 3, 2009 "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks", that's a very aggressive stance anti-banking, anti-central banking and anti-government. That means he clearly highlighted the core root of the problem with money is it requires trust.

Value of Bitcoin:
It's true that Bitcoin didn't immediately become a currency and it's not clearly a currency yet and it's becoming a currency. More and more people are using it which gives value to it. For example the first well known use of bitcoin as currency is the Laszlo's 10,000 BTC worth Pizza (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0).

Disappearance of Satoshi (Silk Road and CIA):
In 2010 Julian Assange founder of Wikileaks is placed on the most wanted and it became clear their are some redlines and if you try to cross those lines their can be very serious consequences, this was now clear to Satoshi too because what could be more serious redline than Governments and their Central Banking Systems where they can trace people's money.

Apparent to Satoshi it was clear that WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet's nest (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2216.msg29280#msg29280) and a storm was headed toward us (him).

Since bitcoin is truly free permissionless and people took advantage of it and the notorious silk road came into the light because they were accepting bitcoin. Although this was just a reason to target bitcoin, because bitcoin is traceable and open to everyone, the public and Governments want to trace a bitcoin they can do it without any special permission or privileges.

Satoshi didn't create bitcoin for criminals and but at the same time he could stop anyone from using bitcoin, Silk Road was one example. Then in April 2011, CIA invited Gavin Andresen to "talk" about bitcoin (https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=6652.0). Although Satoshi was out of the picture after the Silk Road crises, he was still in touch and guiding on emails, but after this CIA incident he truly disappeared forever for his own good.

Satoshi Nakamoto and Hall Finney:
It's really funny how a news magazine found someone with the same name as "Satoshi Nakamoto" and portrayed him as the real Satoshi behind Bitcoin. But interestingly he was living near someone who was actually in communication with Satoshi, Hal Finney and he received the first ever bitcoin transaction from Satoshi. Let's call it a coincidence.

Bitcoin Mining and Blockchain:
I really liked how accurately they defined mining by comparing it with Gold Mining and its scarcity and how it gives value to bitcoin. They also perfectly described Blockchain and how it makes the bitcoin network so secure.

"It's so difficult to tell a lie on the Bitcoin network".

Bitcoin and Power Consumption Myth:
Excellent, how they debunked the power consumption myth with a couple of words like "Let's say (we) spending all this power and energy on bitcoin, what are we getting? Protecting privacy has a price, a high price. Bitcoin is as useful as social networks and streaming services and it will stay that way".

Satoshi and his millions of bitcoins:
Satoshi allegedly mined 22,000 blocks of bitcoin between 2009-2010 earning nearly 1.1 million bitcoins. He's one of the richest people in the world and he's anonymous.

But Satoshi's bitcoins haven't moved an inch. It's so sweetly emphasized that "There have been some that claim to be the inventor bitcoin (Satoshi) but they're not", that includes the clown Craig Wright too.

Rise of Bitcoin clones:
Since bitcoin is open source, people started copying the code and claiming to be more secure, more fast, more anonymous and more energy efficient (better bitcoin alas!). From this rise most if not all were fraudulent and people lost millions, no need to name those I guess. 

In the end they emphasized how bitcoin can favor Governments if they adopt it. But instead they are considering creating their own and controlled version of bitcoin and expecting people to use.

In the end:

"I am not who you think I am, I am not even close, I have carefully sketched a distorted vague image of the opposite of my real self. I am 40, 50, 60 years old, I am a woman, a man and artificial intelligence. I act alone or in a group, does it matter? Bitcoin is collective by definition; it is the result of Decades of research by a wide variety of people. Its code has been run on tens hundreds thousands of computers and even today this how the project continues to grow."


"Freedom has to be fought for over and over again, that's what we're fighting for."

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I'm a big fan of this DW YouTube Channel, It's a German media outlet and broadcaster. Their stories are always unbiased and I loved this documentary so much that I have watched it twice until now and thought of writing this synopsis. I also wondered if they try to reach people here on bitcointalk who are still active since the time of Satoshi for this documentary. With so many references from bitcointalk, I won't be surprised if anyone or theymos was approached too, or if he had any input or maybe he declined for the sake of anonymity.

Thanks shahzadafzal for sharing this documentary with us!

I especially love how they talk about how important privacy is in the beginning of the documentary, i will quote some snippets from it: "...privacy is a revolutionary act, regardless of whether there is something to hide or not"
"Privacy is not secrecy"
"Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world, freedom"

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This goes to a lot of people who think they do not need privacy because they do not have anything to hide from anyone, or people that do not like the talk of privacy because they start taking you to be paranoia, or someone who is up to something bad. It is none of that, our conventional system has taken away our privacy, especially banks; but now one can use BTC as an alternative, it is better to use it differently from the conventional system for it to make sense, that is why decentralized exchanges are encouraged, and stable coins or anything centralized is not recommended, because we'll be losing our privacy and doing things no different than the traditional way by using them.

I agree, this documentary is probably the best introduction to Bitcoin that I have ever seen. It is very well done and the video does a great job of explaining how Bitcoin works and the history behind it. It also describes the importance of anonymity in the world we live in today and how Bitcoin can be used as a way to protect one's privacy. The video also does an excellent job of explaining why Bitcoin has value, and why it is so important for the future of money, and it addresses some of the criticisms that have been leveled against it, such as its volatility and the environmental impact associated with mining. It also explains why the creator of Bitcoin has remained anonymous and why he has not cashed out and become a billionaire.

In my opinion, if you are new to Bitcoin and want a very clear explanation of what it is and how it works, this is the best video to watch. It is well-produced and very easy to understand, even if you are not a technical person. Thanks for posting this, @shahzadafzal.

Thank you for posting this synopsis. I have to say that this is so comprehensive and very detailed that I feel like I have learned the gist already even though I am not yet done watching the documentary. This is not only a good post but would also be helpful for many who wishes to know about bitcoin the history of it all. While the documentary is the primary material of such information, this post could serve as its narrative since it is not guaranteed that the majority are fond of watching long documentary. Regardless of the source, it has always been astonishing for me to learn again and again how bitcoin started and works to this day.

All the ins and outs of Bitcoin are fully covered in your post, and in the video the details of Bitcoin are covered in a lot of ways that we don't get information about easily.  We who are completely new to the forum can learn a lot of unknown information about Bitcoin through this post.  An unknown/pseudonym person named Satoshi Nakamoto published the first bitcoin whitepaper on October 31, 2008 on the website bitcoin.org.  At first Bitcoin was known as Electric Cash or Money.  He first invented Bitcoin primarily as a person-to-person cash transfer over the Internet.  But later Bitcoin was not only used for cash transfer, its scope expanded later.


Bitcoin's most talked about issue is the power loss for Bitcoin mining which is 131 terawatt-hours annually.  A group of researchers calculated this amount of energy and commented that it is almost equal to the entire energy of thirty countries.

• Per Bitcoin Transaction takes 1449 KWH
• Bitcoin mining Electric waste 34 Kilo Tones/Year

The video indeed explained the whole concept of Bitcoin which would be helpful especially for the new ones out there. If they would be looking for discussions, we have plenty of them in this forum but I think video of such would be easier to understand for newbies than to just read technical words which they wouldn't comprehend at first. The thing about the video that I liked the most is the idea of breaking the negative impression of many people towards Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies; just a normal digital currency, its value changes because it is a fraud, and such. Atleast, all of those baseless questions are answered.

Definitely been a long run for Bitcoin and this industry. Bright future ahead as we embrace modernity and technology. If progressive development would be continuous for this industry's end, we might see this industry being acknowledged as a reliable option for daily transactions.

Nice find, I don't mind DW half the time, it's like BBC, gotta know what to watch and what not to!

You might mean Cypherpunks though (don't worry, common confusion, also happened to me when I first came across the term). Unfortunate they get mixed up a lot with cyberpunk... which probably explains quite a lot of mainstream media Bitcoin mixups haha.

Definitely in parts of Europe privacy is sacrosanct, but also in some parts, interest and significance is waning.

Videos are easy for two main reasons. Most of the time they do have written stuff, like animations with texts, which means people who learn by reading could read them, and they have visuals so people who like to see things to learn can see them, and it also explains with a voice so people who like to hear to learn could hear them so it covers all areas.

Secondly, they are there forever, in a compact way, instead of reading 300+ page book, you just watch the video, and if there is any place you do not understand, you could just rewatch it again and again until you understand. That is why videos are always a great way to learn about things and get that information.